More than two years ago, Reuters, the financial news service, opened a new center in Bangalore. The 340 employees, including an editorial team of 13 local journalists, was deployed to write about corporate earnings and broker research on U.S. companies. Since then, the Reuters staff at the center has grown to about 1,600, with 100 journalists working on U.S. stories.

The company has also moved photo editing work from Canada and Washington, D.C., to Singapore.

More expansion is planned in India, according to David Schlesinger, Reuters global managing editor, who said that costs were significantly lower in India, although the competition to recruit financial journalists there was increasing.

The system has "allowed us to really increase the breadth of companies that we cover," Schlesinger said. "One of the problems with the U.S. equities universe is that there are so many companies, and this has allowed us to cover so many more than we could before. And it's allowed us to increase our depth because it's freed up reporters in New York to do more."

Skipping work without good reason? You have lots of company.

Unscheduled absenteeism at U.S. companies and organizations has climbed to its highest level since 1999, according to results of a recent nationwide survey of human resource executives in U.S. companies and organizations.

The survey, conducted for CCH by the Harris Interactive consulting firm, put the U.S. absenteeism rate at 2.5 percent in 2006, up from 2.3 percent a year ago and the highest since seven years ago when it was 2.7 percent.

It found that personal illness accounts for only 35 percent of unscheduled absences, with the rest due to family issues (24 percent), personal needs (18 percent), stress (12 percent) and entitlement mentality (11 percent).

"It was just one of those kinds of things you do and forget about," Hughes says. "The general public is not really supposed to know about this stuff since it's really just for the radio stations. The next thing you know, someone gets a hold of it and it's all over the Internet.

"I don't need to be personally famous for this, but I don't want someone else taking credit for it either."

Fans familiar with Blunt's song can instantly catch the lyrical similarities and sing along with "My Cubicle," a ditty about the life of an office drone:

"My job is stupid, my day's a bore, inside this office from eight to four. Nothin' ever happens, my life is pretty bland. Pretending that I'm working, pray I don't get canned."

"My Cubicle" was just another parody Hughes' company recorded in December and made available to their affiliates on their website and in their daily prep e-mails sent out in January.

"The hundreds of Republican staffers - not to mention more than a few Members -who will lose their jobs in the next few weeks are going to face a hostile marketplace on K Street as unemployed Republicans flood the market," Kate Ackley writes for Roll Call.

"While GOP aides are flooding the town with their resumes, it's now plugged-in Democratic aides whom companies and firms really have an eye for," the article continues.

The head of a lobbying firm that currently employs only Republicans tells the Capitol Hill newspaper, "It's going to be more of a buyer's market for Republican staffers and a seller's market for the Democratic staffers."

Some parents are writing their college-age kids' resumes. Others are acting as their children's "representatives," hounding college career counselors, showing up at job fairs and sometimes going as far as calling employers to ask why their son or daughter didn't get a job.

It's the next phase in helicopter parenting, a term coined for those who have hovered over their children's lives from kindergarten to college. Now they are inserting themselves into their kids' job search -- and school officials and employers say it's a problem that may be hampering some young people's careers.

"It has now reached epidemic proportions," says Michael Ellis, director of career and life education at Delaware Valley College, a small, private school in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

At the school's annual job fair last year, he says, one father accompanied his daughter, handed out her resume and answered most of the questions the recruiters were asking the young woman. Even more often, he receives calls from parents, only to find out later that their soon-to-be college grad was sitting next to the parent, quietly listening.

Jobs counselors at universities across the country say experiences like those are now commonplace.

The company owner doubted that job candidate Eric R. Derby would make a good technical recruiter. Derby seemed too quiet, too reserved. Could he really excel in such a job?

But the owner gave Derby a chance after spotting something at the bottom of his resume.

Derby listed "disc jockey" under a section dubbed "hobbies."

"He assumed that if I was a DJ, I've got to be able to talk to people," said Derby, recalling a conversation he had with the owner months after he was hired. "I tend to come across as quiet and conservative when I don't yet know people. If that hadn't been in the resume, I might not have gotten the job."

Just remember: There is one big risk to listing those hobbies. You never know how a hiring manager might view them.

Something innocuous such as being a fitness buff, for example, might put off a sedentary manager who fears you'll be obnoxious about your exercising ways.

"It's way too much information that a manager doesn't need to know," said Jody Stolt, a national recruitment manager for the Perinton, N.Y.-based PAETEC Communications. "They just need to know that they can do the job."

when your interests or hobbies are so unusual that they are bound to attract positive attention. (One recent alumna, applying for work in the investment industry, listed "mud wrestling" as a hobby. Every recruiter that interviewed her started the interview off with a question about her hobby.)

when your interests or hobbies reflect positively on your job skills. For example, if you are applying for work as a paralegal and you love chess, the recruiter may equate your hobby with analytical abilities.